Behind The Artworks: Gates To The Morning - Return To Earth (2019)

The artwork for “Return To Earth” was one of the last things to come together conceptually for the album.  I was struggling to come up with the artwork for some time and Mark Glaser, who plays lead guitars on the record, encouraged me not to settle for something I wasn’t in love with.  It was so important for me to have artwork that reflected the music and I was afraid I wouldn’t find that.  

At the height of my dilemma I was going through old photos, I had saved on my computer.  A lot of them were photos and artwork I found on the internet that I liked and saved to my computer.  That’s when I stumbled across this beautiful picture. I knew immediately it was going to be the album cover.  The album was already entitled “Return To Earth” and that theme is extremely apparent in the picture.  The winter time theme was important as we have a couple odes to winter on the album such as “Two Winters” and “Freezing The Sundials.”  Another song is titled “Rekindled” and we see the mother earth type figure (that Meg Moyer’s vocals on the record symbolize) decorated with fire as she returns to earth.  She is waking up after a long winter to return to earth.  All the music and song titles were already set in stone before I even found the picture, so it was eerie how well the art matched up.  Of course, there are no coincidences.

The next dilemma was finding the artist. I had seen it used on a few different websites but none of them credited the artist.  It took me at least a month to find out it was from Jesper Alvermark, who is a visual artist from Sweden.  It was one of his works from 2014, I believe. The female was a picture of a model and then Jesper touched it up along with some other stock images.  I don’t even remember exactly how I finally found Jesper but I am glad I did and very grateful that he allowed me to use the artwork, it means a lot to me personally.